DataRPM Launches Cognitive BI Platform, Closes $5.1M Funding Round

Tuesday Mar 11th 2014

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Big Data startup DataRPM will accelerate the go-to-market strategy for its natural language business intelligence platform, called cognitive BI.

DataRPM, which Enterprise Apps Today selected as one of its five hot Big Data startups in December, has closed a $5.1 million Series A funding round. Led by InterWest Partners and joined by CIT GAP Funds, the round will be used to accelerate the company's go-to-market strategy for its business intelligence platform, which makes data analytics more accessible by automating data modeling.

The software, which DataRPM calls cognitive business intelligence, also utilizes a natural language question-and-answer interface to simplify data analysis and visualization.

According to the company, cognitive BI is a combination of statistical, machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. The natural language processor understands users' questions, translates them into an appropriate BI query and displays results with relevant visualizations and suggestions. Cognitive BI automates formerly manual efforts of the data analytics process, from data modeling to the creation of reports and visualization for analysis.

"Our mission is to simplify business intelligence. We provide insights, actions and results from the massive amount of data with a machine first, removing the cumbersome manual lift. Pairing our computational search platform with machine learning and natural language interface greatly simplifies the process of gaining insights from data," said Sundeep Sanghavi, co-founder and CEO of DataRPM, in a statement.

Available both on-premise and in the cloud, DataRPM’s business intelligence platform pulls data from disparate sources and stores it in a distributed computational search index rather than a traditional data warehouse. Using the natural language and search-based query interface to analyze the data, rather than SQL or other code-based interfaces, facilitates analyzing and visualizing data in near real-time.

"We have used several BI tools in the past and with each we spent significant amounts of money and time on setup. We had trouble scaling and adapting to business changes. The solutions were also quite technical and required extra analyst involvement, distancing our business users from the data they needed," said Shankar Rao, CTO of DataRPM customer Transaction Network Services, adding that DataRPM implemented its software in less than 30 days.

Sanghavi's co-founders are Shyamantak Gautam and Ruban Phukan. All three men have backgrounds in business intelligence, Big Data and search, having worked for companies including IBM, Yahoo and Arthur Andersen.

DataRPM is privately held and venture backed. It was recognized as one of the DC area's hottest startups by the Tech Cocktail Showcase in 2013 and was ranked as one of 10 Startups destined to break out in 2014 by Tech.co.